


See

by Omega_93



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow, Twig - Wildbow
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:22:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29584392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omega_93/pseuds/Omega_93
Summary: Shortly after the meeting where a smirking thinker made her question everything she believed about herself, Riley wakes up atop a mound of flesh with funny-smelling rain pattering against her skin. After a bit of careful investigation, it becomes clear she's been dropped in a world that's almost tailor-made for Bonesaw's skillset.The problem is, Riley doesn't want to be Bonesaw anymore.or: Bonesaw wakes up in the world of Twig shortly after Tattletale's teardown.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	1. 1.1: Wound

**1.1 Wound**

Riley woke face down on a pile of rotting flesh with rain hissing static in her ears and a chemical smell in the air. This wasn’t unusual for her and shouldn’t have been cause for concern, but something had her senses on high alert the moment she blinked into consciousness. 

The filter system in her lungs, she realised. Halfway full.

She lurched to her feet, mentally reaching for the internal mechanisms that would allow her to defend herself with plagues and diseases and all variety of nasty things.

Immediately, her surroundings gave her pause. Her bed of meat was as wide as the diamond on a baseball field, and taller than she was twice over—though that wasn’t necessarily saying much. It was a veritable _hill_ of human remains enclosed in a large courtyard. How delightful! 

A frown stole onto her lips. _Was_ it delightful? That felt like a Bonesaw thought, not a Riley thought. 

She was trying not to see things that way anymore, but her head was fuzzy, her thoughts fumbling their way through a pot of treacle pudding. Systems in her body responded to her commands as fast as they were meant to, which made her proud because she’d spent a really really long time on them, but it took her longer than it should have to find a way to activate them in the first place. A process in her inner-ear should have kept her balance, but she felt a light dizziness.

That wasn’t good. She was supposed to have protections in place for this sort of thing. There were so many tricky capes around these days; had one of them got the drop on her?

Looking around, it didn’t seem like it. If someone had caught her off guard, she hardly thought they’d keep her alive.

The mound of meat was surrounded on all sides by buildings, and Bonesaw paused as her attention fell on them. A blink zoomed the vision in one of her eyes, and another blink clarified the image. What she saw had her blinking in shock, her vision inadvertantly cycling through multiple different modes as she slowly wrapped her mind around what she was seeing.

Four stories tall all round, the buildings looked like they’d been _grown_. Dark wood wound and whorled its way through the walls, with gaps between branches intermittently filled with crystal-clear glass to make up windows, then bloomed and curled over it all to form a roof. It was styled like one of those buildings from the English drama show she’d watched that one time with Siberian.

It seemed she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Unlike Dorothy, she had a pretty good idea what had snatched her up and dumped her far from home.

Last she remembered, she’d been restrained in a dark room with only her thoughts for company. They’d been rolling and turning, desperately trying to avoid what Tattletale had gleefully drilled into her but always finding their way back there. To her art, to Jack, to her family. The girl had stolen Riley’s foundations from beneath her, crushed her entire world in the palm of her hand. Nothing had made sense anymore, but at the same time Riley had found she was seeing the world with true clarity for the first time in years. 

Eventually, she’d had to face that Tattletale was right. The pale woman in the suit had arrived a moment later, and Riley had given up her only collateral without a peep of complaint.

 _You have to trust us before we’ll trust you_ , Tattletale had said, so Riley did.

And, as if playing some karmic joke to punish her for daring to move onto the next stage of her metamorphosis and mock her for being so naive as to put her trust in someone, the next thing she knew she was face down in a story-tall hill of flesh. Nothing in between.

“Hey!” she called out to the empty air. “This isn’t fair! I gave you the remote! I cooperated!”

There was no reply.

“I can help! I don’t want the world to end either, I told you that!”

Only the rain whispered back, beating an endless hissing rhythm on the world.

Evidently, they’d decided to keep her out of the way. Dumped her… wherever this was supposed to be. 

She couldn’t blame them. Tattletale had said it best. 

_You get to carry all the shit and all the hate that you earned being an unholy terror before. You deserve to carry all that shit and deal with the hate. You’ve got a steep uphill climb, before you even get a trace of respect or trust._

They were all well within their rights to hate her, to distrust her. After all she’d done, the horrors she’d enacted that she was supposed to feel bad for—they probably saw her as far beyond redemption.

Maybe she was.

“This fucking sucks,” she muttered. Her eyes stung in a way she was unused to. She wiped at them angrily.

The air was acrid with the smell of smoke, soot, and rotting flesh. She sniffed, changing sensory modes to filter out the unnecessary stuff, focusing on the source of the chemicals that were still building in her filter sac.

It was all around her, she realised. She looked _up._

 _It_ is _the rain. What the hell?_

As far as tinker creations went, that was pretty dang impressive. She wondered what it was supposed to do as she hopped off the mound, sliding down the hill of flesh on her butt. When her feet hit the bottom, she let the momentum bleed into a forward run until she was covered by the overhanging roof of the weird tree-building.

Running her hands over the wood, blueprints and ideas unfurled in her mind, like her passenger had just had a moment of inspiration and was _itching_ for her to get stuck into these weird trees. 

Riley frowned. She’d spent so long wondering what parts of her personality were her and what was the alien looking over her shoulder and pulling strings. Now, she thought of Jack, her art, and all the shit Tattletale had said.

She made a full lap around the courtyard, inspecting every nook and cranny of the tree-building, and the inspiration didn’t stop coming. She could grow buildings from seeds of flesh, fill them with traps, make the walls living creatures that absorbed any biological matter that strayed too close, process it and grow the building ever larger.

The idea horrified her as much as it excited her, and she staggered away, turned her attention back to the mound of flesh, more out of a desperate need for a distraction than any actual interest.

“Girl, what are you doing there?” someone called out.

Frustration bubbled in her belly as she whirled around to face the speaker. 

“Don’t talk to me, or I’ll hurt you,” Bonesaw replied, falling back into the familiar, wearing it like armour.

Seven men stepped into the courtyard through a dark arch, pulling a cart behind them that left deep trenches in the mud. Only one of them seemed to be paying her any mind—he walked at the head of the procession, making no effort to help his friends pull their heavy load. A long black lab coat whipped around him in the wind as he strode towards her, leaving the cart behind. It seemed to somehow shrug off the rain. 

The rest were staring off into space, vacant. Bonesaw squinted at them, wondering if they were drunk. 

“I said I’d hurt you,” Bonesaw told Mr Blackcoat as he got close, pasting a smile onto her face.

“Have you lost your parents, little girl?” the man asked as if she hadn’t spoken. Up close, he had oddly clear skin and luscious hair. He could’ve modelled in a fashion magazine and he spoke like the queen of England. “What are you doing here?” he repeated.

Bonesaw let her smile drop. “Where is _here?_ ”

“The stitched disposal pile,” he said slowly, as if she was an idiot. Rude!

“I was talking about the city, you meanie!”

“Radham. How do you find your way to a place like this without even knowing its name?”

Bonesaw stomped one foot and shook the opposite fist. “I really will hurt you, you know?”

“I see.” He drew out the word as he gave her a slow once-over. “How intimidating.”

_Well. That’s it._

Fed up, Bonesaw flicked her arm out. Imperious, like a queen decreeing that someone who had insulted her must be taken to the tower!

She pointed at the object of her ire and her fingernail tore away, fired like a bullet. It struck the man in the chest with the force of a punch from Crawler, and he staggered back, wide-eyed. He dropped to the ground a moment later, a stain of purple-red growing on the chest of his shirt.

Still, his companions didn’t move, staring blankly ahead. Curious.

“Believe me nooow?” Bonesaw asked in a sing-song voice.

The man gurgled as he tried to scramble backwards, a guttural noise of raw, primal pain rumbling in his chest. Bonesaw could see his skin bubbling beneath his shirt. He fumbled at the pocket of his coat with a violently shaking hand.

She stepped up to him, toeing his arm away and pressing it down into the mud. “Come on, you big baby. It doesn’t hurt that bad. I used that same poison on an old lady once and she barely even screamed!”

Bonesaw giggled at the memory. Then she felt bad.

 _That’s not something a good girl does,_ she thought, her mood plummeting into a pit. She looked at the blackcoat man. _This isn’t either._

Riley considered him for a moment, then placed a finger on his chest—a different one this time.

“Could you answer some questions for me, please?” she said. A system kept her expression neutral, ignoring her turning stomach.

The man twitched. She took it for assent.

Apparently, Radham was a medium-sized city in the eastern Crown States, proud of its prestigious Academy and not much else—maybe that was unfair, poor Professor Mitchell was probably in too much pain to dredge up more pertinent information about the city, but he’d done his best. In the end, he’d given her all she needed to know.

Radham. Crown states. The Academy. Wollstone’s ratios. Stitched.

All big enough clues on their own, but…

1922, he’d told her.

Somehow, Bonesaw had found herself almost a century in the past.

“Gosh dang darn diddily fuck,” she muttered. They couldn’t have dropped her off somewhere more modern?

 _No,_ she thought. A world where biology had advanced in place of engineering? It was practically made for her.

The men around the cart didn’t even flinch at her approach, nor did they seem to have any strong opinions about their comrade lying unconscious on the cold, wet ground. As she got closer, she got a pretty good clue as to why that was. 

They were zombies! Well, sort of. There was a word he’d used earlier… stitched?

Their skin was grey and sallow, marred by cross-crossing lines of black thread. Lifeless eyes stared vacantly ahead out of sunken sockets, and little pillars of steam wafted into the air where the rain fell on grey skin. Each of them wore the same simple uniform: a long flappy grey coat buttoned at the front, with rectangular patches sewn to either side of the buttons, over black trousers that had seen plenty of wear and tear tucked into sturdy black boots that climbed halfway up their shins. They looked like they’d been made by a necromancer with an American civil war fetish.

Something about them made her deeply uncomfortable, twisting her stomach and stabbing something icy-cold into her heart. Bonesaw tilted her head, considering them. They hadn’t leapt to the defence of their… was he their creator? Looking back at the man, still twitching in his sleep, he didn’t give her the _feel_ of a creator. He looked too ordinary.

Whatever he was, whoever he was, they hadn’t leapt to his defence when she’d attacked him. From the way he’d been frantically trying to grab it, she figured the whistle he’d had in his pocket was the mechanism by which they were controlled. Any _really_ good work would’ve acted autonomously.

Bonesaw stared into the man’s vacant eyes, then let her gaze trail down the lines of stitches that made a distorted puzzle out of his face. Like a grim epiphany, the answer for why she was so uncomfortable came to her.

Memories itched and scratched. They were things she didn’t like to think about, and so it had been a long time since she had. Some were mired in fog, some were clear as glass.

It went without saying that the look on her mother’s face as the light left her eyes fell in the latter category. Her passenger would allow nothing less. 

Standing in the rain on a planet that might as well be alien, the images overlapped, and she was back in the house, running up the stairs as Jack called out taunts and threats, her hands slick with blood from where she’d sewn her family’s skin shut for the dozenth time.

An ugly feeling curdled in her. A dark sensation. It tore through her safeguards, battered down her protections, and surged through her body until it felt like it was propping her up—she was a puppet on strings, slave to that emotion. One she’d repressed for so long she almost forgot she could feel it. 

For the first time in a long time, Bonesaw remembered that she hated Jack Slash more than anything in the world, and she _lashed out._

The patchwork men who had so fascinated her became demons to be slain, and she brought all she had to bear against them. She made one melt like wax with flesh-eating enzymes, another bubble and burst in an explosive biological reaction, and a third she tore apart from the inside with a fast-acting parasite. She unleashed herself on them, totally and entirely; she eviscerated them, denied their existence, turned them into nothing, used them to paint a picture of all the rage and despair she’d been forced to bottle up for so long, screaming to anyone who watched that her life had been taken from her and she could never get it back.

She couldn’t remember what her mother looked like anymore. Only the stitches. 

That, in the end, was the biggest crime Jack had enacted upon her. He’d kept her moving, always dangling the next intrigue in front of her nose, always ready with a new distraction, but all the while he’d made sure she never left that house, chased up and down the stairs by his echoing laughter as he tore her family apart again and again and _again_ , only to neatly slot his roving band of degenerates into her mind in their place. Her new brothers and sisters and aunties and uncles and mommies and daddies, murderers one and all.

She’d been six.

A scream tore out of her throat, aimed at everything and nothing. At the rain, at herself, at the world, at _Jack._

“Fuck you, you fuckers! Give them back! Give them back give them back give them _back_!” 

When only one remained, showered in gore and blood and chemicals, Bonesaw stopped. Stared. She wondered if he felt any fear—or anything at all—as she lifted her hand, pointing a dainty finger, like a queen about to bestow a command upon her subject.

The rain hissed in her ears like a serpent. Now that she was paying attention to it, she could taste the chemicals in the water; the source of the fluid steadily building in the filter in her lungs.

She pictured Jack before her, and her decree passed her lips.

“Die.”

She’d show him true art.

The patchwork man died horribly. He died beautifully. He died in a way that would’ve brought horror to the patchwork monstrosity where her mother’s face was supposed to be.

_Be a good girl._

Riley fell to her knees and cried.

~~~


	2. 1.2

Radham was like a warped nightmare mirror of Oliver Twist.

Townhouses were scarred by twisting branches of wood, giving them a feel like they were stitched together facades of an old terrace from the streets of Victorian London, complete with distant smoke stacks belching smog into the sky. Roads were more muck and mud than stone, and their occupants were a chaotic mix of carriages, carts, horses, and loping beasts, and they all moved as if rules of the road were a notion that wouldn’t be invented for years.

The people were much the same. Dapper coats and traditional dresses were common, but nowhere near the number of men dressed in those same uniforms she had seen earlier. They were on every street corner, watching, waiting. Only one in ten of them had any kind of life in their eyes.

An impulse to question crackled at the back of Riley’s mind, an instinct similar to hunger that demanded she gorge herself on new knowledge and eat her fill on experimentation, but she ignored it. She’d fed her power more than enough for today, she felt.

Not too long ago she would’ve found this place utterly delightful. Now, it only made her feel dread. 

Unfortunately, there was no escaping it no matter how far she walked. Every turn she took revealed a new abnormality, every new street a new exhibit in a museum of old horror movies. 

There was a tension in the air. An energy. It was in the dark looks, the lips twisted in anger, the barely-concealed hatred in the eyes of people who wore the more shabby clothing whenever one of the ornate carriages rolled by. Riley wouldn’t have been surprised if a riot broke out at any moment.

People gave her odd looks as she weaved through the crowd, moving without purpose. No one tried to talk to her, at least. People instinctively wanted to help a lost child—a fact she’d exploited more than a few times over the years—but her looming companion was apparently enough to dissuade them of the idea.

There was also the fact that she was perfectly happy to walk along the pathways, while most people seemed to stick beneath eaves, awnings, and gutters where they could, keeping out of the pounding, incessant rain.

She explored wide streets and dark alleys with no destination in mind. There wasn’t much in her mind at all, really. She’d spent all the mental energy she had to give back at the stitched disposal pile, and now she felt hollowed out. 

The feeling brought her back, all the way to that moment where she’d been so exhausted that all she could do was lie there and watch while her mother’s blood slowly seeped out onto that carpet, and all she had been able to do was smile as her mother’s last breath rattled past her lips.

_Be a good girl._

The words turned over and over in her mind. Somewhere along the way they’d been warped, twisted into some monstrous reflection, until she didn’t even know what good was anymore. 

Right now, she felt like the furthest thing from a good girl.

“Guh,” the man following behind her grunted. 

“Be quiet,” she said. It hadn’t been an actual attempt at speech, she knew, just a blowback from the hasty work she’d done on him.

Mr Tall towered over her. She wouldn’t have been able to slap the top of his egg-like head if she jumped as high as she could and stretched her arm out to its limit. He kept his arms pinched to his sides and walked with an unsteady gait. A dozen eyes swivelled from within sunken cheeks, a strong chin, and a wide forehead made wider by the lack of hair. His face was like what you’d get if a dementia patient tried to emulate a Picasso painting: too many eyes, noses, and ears crammed into a space that had no right to fit them in.

Looking at him made her heart sink, so she tried her best not to.

He had been mean to her, and a cursory inspection had revealed that the patchwork men had once been real human beings, part of their brains removed and brought back to life, stitched together. Seeing as he called himself a professor, maybe he’d done that to them.

But she wasn’t sure that meant he deserved _this._

She didn’t know why she’d done that to him. Hadn’t really thought about it until she was already halfway done. It was like a reflex. 

But was it reflex?

 _Or is it a certain someone—or some_ thing— _putting a finger on the scales?_

The thought scared her. 

“Guh,” he said, muffled by the flap of skin sewn over his single mouth.

“I don’t know where we’re going,” she said, as much to herself as to Mr Tall. 

It was like karma, somehow. Barely a moment after she’d uttered the words, something caught her eye.

Riley stopped at the entrance to a dark, damp alley, head tilted, peering into the gloom. If it weren’t for the work she’d done on her eyes, she wouldn’t have been able to see it; a little girl was hunched beneath a short overhang, crouched low to the ground with her arms wrapped around her legs. 

She was shivering.

Riley found herself standing before the child before she’d even considered what she was going to do once she got there.

The girl didn’t move. Her face was tucked into her knees, her shoulders hunched.

A scared child—maybe eleven or twelve years old at a guess—cold and alone on the streets of a town that looked like it was the set of a horror movie. A good person would help, wouldn’t they?

“Hey,” Riley said.

The girl cringed at the sound of Riley’s voice. She shifted a smidgen, peeking out from between her knees.

“What do you want?” the girl asked, all hostility and hurt. Her accent was a weird, throaty amalgamation of American and Cockney, like someone from Boston trying to do an Artful Dodger impression.

_Good question._

Riley looked the girl over, taking in her wispy brown hair, her wide hazel eyes, her rail-thin limbs. The material of her dress looked like it had come from a potato sack. Almost a cliche.

“Why’re you out here alone?” Riley asked. “Where are your parents?”

The girl shrugged.

Riley scowled, had to fight down her irritation when the girl shrunk in on herself.

_Dang it._

A mental command activated systems throughout her body, the same ones she’d used to try and conceal her deceit from Jack. Even as she felt like lashing out at the girl for her rudeness, a small, calm smile found its way to her face. She crouched down so she was level with the child.

“I’m Riley. What’s your name?”

“Why d’you wanna know?”

“I want to help you,” Riley said.

_Because that’s what a good girl would do._

“Why? I ain’t seen you before. I don’t know you. And you got a funny accent.” The girl’s gaze flicked over Riley’s shoulder, tense and wary.

_Says you._

Riley made a gesture behind her back, and Mr Tall lumbered back to the alley’s entrance, his feet slopping in the mud.

“Sorry about him. He’s not as scary as he looks,” Riley said.

“He has a black coat,” the girl said.

“Yeah. He was some kind of professor, apparently.”

Somehow, the girl’s eyes only got wider. Her mouth moved soundlessly, gaping like a fish.

“He won’t hurt you, not if I don’t want him to.”

“You killed a professor? Made him into an exper’ment?”

There was rather more wonder in the girl’s eyes than Riley thought appropriate. Professor Whatsisname hadn’t been all that impressive.

“Yeah. Guess I did.”

“Can you kill ghosts?”

Riley wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “You’re haunted?” she asked after a long moment.

“Not that kind of ghost. At least I don’t think,” the girl said. Her eyes darted left and right, searching. “There’s been people taking kids. We call ‘em ghosts, because we never get a good look at ‘em.”

“Then why are you out here alone?”

The girl’s face crumpled, and Riley knew she’d said the wrong thing.

“I wasn’t,” the girl said.

Her heart thundered in her ears, to the point it was vying with the hissing rain for dominance.

“What’s your name?” Riley asked again.

“Cecelia,” she said. “But everyone calls me Celly.”

Someone stealing away vulnerable children off the streets, from their families, seeking to do who-knows-what with them. 

Riley could picture Jack’s face, grinning down at her.

“Tell me everything, Celly.”

~~~

They called themselves mice, and the more she heard about them, the more her idle thought about this nightmarish parody of Oliver Twist rang true.

A pack of orphaned or abandoned children, roaming the derelict streets in the bad parts of the city, lying, cheating, and stealing to put food in their bellies, they were on the bottom rung of society, the most weak, the most vulnerable, and for that they were preyed on.

Hence: mice.

Celly led her through winding back alleys as she explained, sneaking around check-points—a curfew on the city due to rebels, she explained—as their surroundings decayed in a steady gradient. By the time they reached the general area Celly had last seen her friend, Janice, half of the buildings around them were sporting rotten wood, shattered or missing windows, and swiss-cheese roofs. More than a few had even collapsed, and there was no uniformity to the ones that were still standing; a one-story stone shack would be nestled between a three-story tree-building and a five-story wooden cave-in hazard.

Celly stopped at the mouth of a wide street and peeked around the corner. When she found what she was looking for—or _not_ looking for, more likely—she turned her attention to Riley, still skittish as a… well, a mouse.

“We’re here,” she said. “This is where I last saw her. We were on a lookout, see. I left her just for a minute, and when I came back she was gone. I tried to look for her, but I couldn’t find her nowhere.”

Riley turned to Mr Tall, gesturing at Celly. “See if you can get her friend’s scent. A girl. She should smell like this one.” 

Mr Tall moved to obey. He ducked low to the ground, turning his head as if he was listening closely, but instead heaving in great breaths of air through his half-dozen noses, taking care to make sure one of his noses was always pointed in Celly's direction. Nostrils flared, it wasn’t long before he stopped, several sets of eyes fixed on Riley’s.

“Follow it,” she said.

Mr Tall started slow, but soon his loping steps took up a faster pace, and Riley and Celly had to run behind him. He led them back through the outskirts of the city, rushing towards Radham proper, as if beckoned by the tower in the distance. 

Rain pounded down, soaking the ground and making for slippery footing, and she had to call out to Mr Tall so they didn’t leave Celly behind. The girl was unaugmented, and a child besides. She drew in hungry, heaving breaths, and her face had gone an angry red before they’d even run three blocks. 

Riley’s patience with the girl ran out on the fourth block. When Celly once again stopped, stooping with her hands on her knees, wheezing desperately, Riley approached.

“I’m sorry… I ain’t—”

She didn’t get to finish. The needle at the end of Riley’s pinky jabbed into her neck, straight into the artery. Celly staggered back, eyes going wild, an inarticulate noise of alarm tearing out of her throat. Her eyes bulged, veins on her neck sticking out as she wailed like a forest creature. She backed up until her back was to the sodden wall behind her, writhing. Her neck bulged like a balloon, then deflated to normal size in a second. The effect travelled down her body, like a great bubble of air was trying to escape the confines of her skin. Up her arms, across her shoulders, through her torso, down her legs.

Riley had to look away and stifle a giggle. It was like that old cartoon with the guy who ate the spinach.

Finally, the effect faded. Celly collapsed against the wall. Her shoulders heaved. Her limbs shook so violently it looked like play-acting.

Silence, broken only by the thundering rain. It was coming down hard enough that pain receptors on the top of Riley’s head were flaring. She switched them off.

“You okay?” Riley asked.

Celly looked up and her eyes were wild, feverish. She growled like a jungle cat. “What the heck did you just do to me?!”

“You looked tired, so I gave you a pick-me-up.”

“Ask first!”

Riley sighed. People were always so difficult about these things.

Then again… wasn’t she kind of within her rights to be upset about it? Sticking people with unknown substances without warning probably wasn’t a nice thing to do.

_Crap._

“We didn’t have time,” Riley said, grasping for an excuse. Time hadn’t been a consideration, really. She was just fed up with the constant stopping. “It’s not permanent?” she tried.

“Why does that sound like a fuckin’ question?”

Riley had to fight the urge to scold the girl for her rude language. “Do you want to save”—what was her name? Dang it—“your friend or not?”

Celly growled, deep and low, but she pushed herself to her feet. Mr Tall set off once more, and they didn’t stop again after that, not even after a dozen blocks.

Far into the chase, Riley stumbled mid-step as something almost familiar tickled at the edge of her hearing. It was faint, but after a little bit of tuning her senses, it clarified. It was like nails on a chalkboard, but higher and more methodical. It undulated, took turns and twists. Sometimes it winked in and out like a strobe or a tweeting bird, other times it sustained a note for long seconds. 

She’d never have been able to hear it if she hadn’t messed with her ears so she could listen to Shatterbird’s singing.

A shudder went down her spine. 

She gathered speed until she’d left Mr Tall behind to splish-splash through puddles of mud behind her. The sound called to her like a siren’s song. She hurtled along streets, down alleys, she climbed walls and scaled buildings, darted around people and horses and monsters that, by all rights, belonged in fairy tales or her lab. 

Celly called out to her, but she ignored it. The drugs she’d given the girl would be more than enough to let her keep up.

As she got closer, she realised the reason the sound had been so weird.

There were multiple. Two. Then three. Four, and even more. A whole pack of high-pitched shrieks, singing to one another, communicating.

Not Shatterbird then. The revelation was both a disappointment and a relief. She was a monster more than worthy of the Nine, but there’d been nice moments. Watching old movies, talking about art. She’d even let Riley study her power. Mixed feelings went to war within her, and she had to force a truce upon them as the ringing voice drew closer.

Eventually, they barrelled onto a wide street, populated only by a single carriage drawn by a pair of patchwork horses. It was moving at a sedate pace, no rush. The ringing was so intense she could feel it resonating in her bones. 

Mr Tall shot towards it like a charging rhino.

“Looks like your friend’s in there,” Riley said, slowing to a walk, observing. “Let Mr Tall handle it.”

Celly ignored her, following in Mr Tall’s footsteps with a wild look in her eyes. “Janice!” she cried, utterly giving up what small element of surprise they might have had.

Riley sighed. She had a feeling this wasn’t going to go well.

The ringing in her ears reached a crescendo, like the final note of one of Shatterbird’s opening announcements, and a raven-haired Asian woman clad in a voluminous black dress emerged from an alleyway between Mr Tall and the carriage. Her arm lashed out, and a knife buried itself in Mr Tall’s neck.

Mr Tall reacted, launching himself forward on legs that extended like uncoiling springs. At that moment, Riley cursed herself for not thinking to name him Mr Jack-in-a-box. Why was her sense for naming things so bad?

The woman—one of these Ghosts Celly had talked about, presumably—moved fast, dancing away with barely a change in expression. More knives appeared in her grip, and she raised them for her counterattack as Mr Tall flew past her.

Unfortunately for her, she’d underestimated her opponent.

Mr Tall _twisted_ , his torso facing the opposite way to his legs as he landed, and his arms lashed out, uncoiling just as his legs had done.

To her credit, the Ghost woman reacted fast, despite seemingly having no way to have seen the attack coming. She swung one of her knives behind her in a wide arc with perfect timing, but managed to do little more than score a deep slash in one of Mr Tall’s arms before his vast palm clamped around her head. His fingers uncoiled like a chameleon’s tongue, encasing her skull in a cage of bone, and the bone _squeezed_. The Ghost writhed and thrashed, and Riley was sure the ringing in her ears had grown higher in pitch, frantically tweeting like a bird that had been caught by a cat. Mr Tall lifted her bodily off the ground, then slammed her down face-first into the mud and held her there. She went still.

Celly barrelled past them both. She had eyes only for the carriage, and Riley’s heart skipped a beat as another Ghost stepped out of an adjacent alleyway. But almost as quickly as it had appeared, it backed away once more. Another did the same from a different alley. Then another in a doorway across the street. 

More followed them, materialising from alleys, doorways, and corners. Never peeking out for more than a second, and always within an instant of one another. It was like the world’s weirdest game of whack-a-mole, and it was eerily coordinated.

It was supposed to be intimidating, Riley was sure, but they’d only given the game away.

_So that was it._

“The ringing. You really were talking to each other,” Riley said, and disparate feelings warred within her.

They were _fascinating_. She so desperately wanted to see how they worked.

They were also living up to the name the mice had given them. If not for the implants in her ears, Riley would never have known they were making the slightest sound as they glided around with preternatural grace.

Celly certainly hadn’t noticed, hurtling towards the carriage with all the grace of a rampaging bull. 

Riley grimaced, and stepped up to intervene. If there was one thing in the world she could unequivocally think of as good, it would be stopping a bunch of baddies who were kidnapping children. 

“Keep that one alive,” she called out to Mr Tall.

Spinning on the spot, she slashed her arm sideways. Lengths of bone pierced the end of her fingertips, propelled forward by a pneumatic sac implanted into her palm. They whistled through the air, faster than the eye could track, and snapped against a wooden wall, and the wood started to sizzle and bubble where they struck. 

Riley blinked, then brought her fingers close to her eyes, cycling through different modes of vision. Her dart shooters were all aligned. The scaffolding-like implants that criss-crossed under her skin were in place and working as intended.

“Did you dodge that?” Riley called out, awed. She was sure she had the timing right.

There was no answer aside from the knife that found its way into a gap in her ribs, but that was hardly a bother. 

Riley smiled despite herself as one darted out into view on the other side of her, poking its head around a corner. It was similar in height and lavish clothing to the others, but dark-haired this time, with familiar East-Asian features that prodded at her memory. She was starting to recognise faces in the crowd.

Riley gave a small wave. “Hey,” she called out with a voice far calmer than she felt. “Can we just talk or something? I’d rather just get the kid’s friend and go. I give you back your friend there”—she gestured at Mr Tall and his captive—“and you give us the girl you’ve got in that carriage. We don’t need to fight.”

The woman ducked behind cover, just like the other had done. The women were shifting, circling around her, hemming her in, singing to each other at pitches inaudible to regular human hearing.

 _Pack hunters_ , she thought.

“I’ll take that as a no,” she said out loud, her shoulders slumping.

Well, they were in for a nasty surprise. Riley wasn’t prey.

Riley gestured to Mr Tall, and he aimed a cannon-like kick at the wall behind him. It hit with a sound that she _felt_ as much as she heard, and the wall exploded, sending dust and debris raining across the street and into the building. 

She caught a glimpse of movement within the lingering dust in the air. The ghost, untouched. Even through a wall, it had seen the attack coming, or maybe one of the others had.

Riley tilted her head, thinking, listening. The ringing was omnipresent, though it was _just_ too high-pitched for her to pick out any kind of pattern. She looked the ghosts over, one-by-one, tracking them as they darted in and out of cover.

Earlier she’d thought of them like wolves, but that didn’t quite fit. 

_They’re like bats._

The high-pitched noise wasn’t just them communicating, it was _sonar_. They didn’t need to look at her to see the attack coming.

Riley sighed. “Get to the carriage, Mr Tall. I’ll deal with these guys.”

She knew she wasn’t much of a fighter, but she had plenty of tricks up her sleeve.

Back in her days with the Nine, Riley had dabbled in sonic attack vectors, inspired by her sound-loving teammate. She hadn’t progressed that line of research super far, but she’d come up with some neat little tricks to prevent her stuff getting messed up by Shatterbird’s arrival announcements. It was also neat for wordlessly commanding her minions, so win-win.

She just had to shift some things around first.

Activating a mechanism in her throat, Riley’s mouth gaped open like a snake. She held it there, waiting.

The sonars echoed and bounced, conversing with frantic energy. They dipped in and out of cover, sometimes in her view, sometimes behind her. Riley’s attack had shown them she could find them without seeing, and they were testing, teasing. Riley gave them nothing.

Finally, they made a more reckless move, a woman darting out of cover and dashing forward in an attempt to intercept Celly and Mr Tall before they could reach the carriage.

It would have to do.

A _wail_ erupted from Riley’s throat, so high-pitched it felt like it was going to crack her skull like Shatterbird liked to do with her wine glasses. 

The Ghost flinched as if slapped, and Mr Tall was upon her in her moment of weakness, striking like a viper, reaching out an impossible distance to curl his twisted fingers around her skull. The woman thrashed in his grip, but a touch from one of the needles that darted out from the tip of Riley’s finger had her unconscious in a jiffy.

It took her a moment to rehinge her jaw so she could speak. “You guys feel like talking now?”

There was no reply. The Ghosts had gone deathly silent. 

“Hmph. Realised I can hear you, huh? Come out, or your friends here are gonna have a bad time. Don’t try anything, or I’ll just mess you up again.”

One by one, the women emerged, and Riley blinked. There were more of them than she’d thought, more than twenty, and some of them were so identical to one another they had to be clones. A clever trick.

They stared at Riley with lifeless eyes, and a thought occurred to her.

“Can you guys talk?”

They stared.

“Dang it,” she said, pouting. Whatever mechanism they used to make their freaky sonar, it had evidently replaced their vocal chords. Either that or they just didn’t want to talk to her.

With two of their guys unconscious in her monstrous minion’s grip, she’d thought they’d be more willing to negotiate.

Tension built. The Ghosts stared her down, and Riley stared back. Violence simmered, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine the way this would go, picture the steps, predict their actions. They were total unknowns, and she found that she was dying to find out what they would do.

Celly reached the carriage, slamming into and _through_ the wooden door on its side, screaming for her friend. The silhouette of a man went tumbling off the driver’s bench, hitting the muddy ground with a wet thud. He shot to his feet, scrabbling for the safety of the nearest doorway. Riley half expected the host occupying said doorway to gut him, but she stepped aside to let him pass without giving him a second glance.

At that same moment, with Riley’s attention split puzzling out just who the hell this guy was supposed to be, the Ghosts made their move.

They ran.

Shapes darted away in the corner of her vision, fading back into alleys, dashing into doorways, disappearing over rooftops. Every time she turned her head, more slipped away. In what felt like no time at all, they were all gone.

“Huh?”

Riley stayed on guard, waiting for the ambush. When nothing happened, she manipulated internal systems, rewiring nerves, working on her brain on the fly, and she strained her hearing to its limit.

Nothing. No sign of them. Not a peep of the sonar-scream they’d been using.

Disparate feelings warred within her. She supposed a moment like this was supposed to be a triumphant one; standing tall beneath pouring rain having fought off a bunch of baddies and saved the innocent little girl. She’d surely done a good thing. A deed to be proud of.

She felt nothing. Hollow. There was a hole in her chest and something heavy in her stomach as she walked towards the Ghost she’d killed.

Blood had spattered into the puddle by the Ghost’s body, swirling in curious crimson shapes and mingling with her fiery hair as it fanned out in the murky water. Riley watched it, somewhat entranced. An impulse surfaced, almost an intrusive thought, and Bonesaw itched to take her apart and see what was inside her, to figure out how it worked and devise a counter, to _improve_ on it and use it for her own ends.

Riley felt sick.

Was that her, or her passenger? Was she the artist, or the art?

“Riley!” Celly called out from behind her.

“What?” The word came out a little snappier than she intended. She turned. “What?” she tried again, softer.

The girl had managed to drag her friend out of the carriage—a black-haired slip of a thing with dirty, ratty clothes, and a face bisected by an angry scar. Somehow, even wide-eyed and shaking with her friend unconscious in her arms, the light in Celly’s eyes was far brighter than it had been when Riley had stumbled across her in that dark alley. 

“Help. Please.”

Riley looked down at the Ghost. The urge to _know_ was all-consuming, so intense she could just barely keep herself from diving on the corpse and cutting it open to see what it looked like on the inside. 

_Be a good girl._

She wrenched herself away, teeth clenched, muscles taut. 

“Let me have a look at her,” she ground out. Every step away from the Ghost’s trove of secrets was agony, and she had to keep her stare fixed on the ground, ignoring the alluring call of the corpse.

There was no reply.

Riley looked up.

Celly had gone still, staring at something in the distance, guarded and tense.

Riley followed her gaze, grimacing.

There were three of them, standing in the middle of the street. Children or early teens in all but the look in their eyes. Two boys, one girl. 

One of them was tall and blond, handsome for his age, with lean muscle one never would never expect to see in a kid. He looked casual, loose, but he frowned at Mr Tall with recognition in his eyes.

The girl wore fancy clothes, had her brown hair tied up with ribbons in an elaborate pattern that looked like it must have taken hours, and held herself with a regal air, but her eyes were razor-sharp, fixed on Riley with unerring intensity, and she held herself like she was ready to attack at any moment.

Worst of all was the boy. From a distance, he looked more like a kid out of Oliver Twist or Mary Poppins than anyone she’d seen so far, with the chimney-sweep hat, the suspenders, the shin-swinging trousers and the dark tweed jacket. Messy black hair peeked out from beneath his cap.

But his green eyes gleamed with merciless intelligence, and through them she could see the silhouette of a hideous creature, some predator prowling for its next kill, a schemer who delighted in the game.

A monster.

“Aww shucks,” he said, a familiar grin on his lips. “Looks like we missed all the fun.”

~~~


End file.
